What annoys me most about all of those “Well, RT doesn’t count” arguments, even more so than the “Criticism – Ur doing it wrong” one, is “But RT is a romance publication, so who cares what they have to say about SF? After all, Strange Horizons doesn’t review romance either.” My answer to this would be, “Well, why don’t they?” Because it is certainly telling that RT Book Reviews, though primarily a romance publication, reviews SF, fantasy, crime fiction and lots of other genres, whereas the main SFF review publications only stick to speculative fiction with the occasional excursion into literary SFF, while excluding certain subgenres like urban fantasy, even though they clearly are speculative fiction. It’s widely known that romance readers are not just very avid readers, but also willing to read across genres. So why aren’t SFF readers willing to step outside their genre bubble?

Over all the discussion about this year’s all-male shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, it’s easily forgotten who actually won. Well, in this case it was Chris Beckett for his novel Dark Eden. I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment. The premise of an isolated lost space colony is fairly familiar, but then a lot of good SFF is based on very familiar premises. Nice cover, though.